as far as I remember I could always double click the .deb and the GUI would let me install it, pretty handy. Aaand it stopped working some time ago. I'm not using ubuntu outside of work and there's not much system package installing in work environments so I'm out of touch now, but it was handy at the time.
The discord snap is basically unusable for me so that's the only way I can have discord installed. I'll probably switch away from kubuntu next time if it inherited this problem.
you can go into the command line and write "flatpak upgrade", but every time I open the discord app it apparently downloads something, idk if it's self updating correctly or not.
What are you talking about? It is not even "for free", they get a lot value from the community.
They're nothing without the users, it's not that they would be making it if nobody uses it anyways. Users used to love them, they trusted them, they went on spreading their system, reported issues, created tutorials, flavors, videos, tools, and so on, they helped Cannonical become what it is now.
I don't think they're giving us anything "for free."